Pho Peanut Butter

Each time we leave our villages and head into the main provincial town to meet up with all the volunteers, we manage to find ourselves yet again stocking up on comfort food or treats to make it through the week. My new love is peanut butter from Vietnam. The $1.20 for this slice of heaven is a splurge I am willing to make. You may find yourself thinking, $1.20 isn’t that much of a splurge. However there in lies the falsie. Let me break down my daily spending for you. Breakfast is free at my parent’s restaurant. Nothing gets the day going better than rice and chicken bits with an overly sweet iced coffee. Then around 10 or 11, I buy an ice-coffee to-go on my break at school. I can imagine you are envisioning me drinking a Starbucks grande iced vanilla latte. False. We are taking condensed milk, coffee, ice….in a bag with a straw, all for a whopping 1500 riel, about 35 cents. After school when the Khmer language has managed to seep into my brain enough to regurgitate words to my teacher, but not enough to reappear in my brain when needed to explain anything to my family, I eat lunch with the family or neighbors. Another free meal, as of late consisting of the largest plate of rice ever (I mean like imagine a salad bowl the size of a plate then pile it with a mound of rice, x3 times a day = my daily caloric overload) paired with a fish soup and mystery vegetables. At least the word for vegetables has stuck in my brain, so I know I’m in the clear for not eating an animal part. Then I return to school and perhaps venture for another snack around 4pm, basically to just get away for school for a bit and actually use language. So some great snack options in our village, fried bananas 2000 riel (less than 50 cents), bread with fruit inside 1000 riel (less than a quarter) or amazing tropical fruit 2000-3000 riel for a kilo, which is usually way to much for one person to consume. After school, I head home for another free meal with the family. Let me digress to some of the other expenses I have acquired so far in life in a small village in Cambodia. Yesterday my bike tire acquired a small hole, perhaps because the street between my house and school has now been filled with trash, be it Styrofoam coolers to house tiles to bottles to immense amounts of plastic bags. Nevertheless my biking skills are not spectacular, so the minuscule path that has been cleared in the trash just adds to traverse, in addition motos always have the right away here, so when then are approaching it’s trash or death. Anyways this is most likely how I acquired the hole in my bike tire, and with the help of one of our teachers I managed to get my tire fixed. The man had to completely take my wheel apart and work on it for 15 minutes, then blow my tire back up. The cost… 1000 riel, (less than a quarter for 15 minutes of hard labor.) Another purchase I made yesterday was flour to make an apple crisp for my family. For a half kilo of flour it was only 1500 riel… I wish that flour in the states would be less than a dollar for a kilo. So I digress how spending a $1.20 on one jar of peanut butter has now become expensive.